Hi...As you can see, this is not a technical question :).But I was just wondering how sites like yelp,stackoverflow sustained the early stages. In the case of stackoverflow, there would not be much users and much questions or answers. So even if someone had asked a question, they wud not ve received much answers as they do now :).But now it is HUGE, like more than half a million questions and thousands of users1. I was just looking for your thoughts on this

2 Answers
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Stack Overflow is such a huge success primarily due to the fact that the two site founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, were and are very prominent technology bloggers, and therefore had plenty of programmers as readers, who became the initial vibrant community of Stack Overflow.

wow...3 million questions...it was mentioned in wikipedia as 515000. But that was as of feb 2010
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SteveJun 27 '10 at 22:11

3

While the latest question may be numbered over 3 million, it is not the 3 millionth question. The number of questions is right there on the Questions tab (currently just ~757K). I recall Jeff saying questions and answers are treated as essentially the same thing in the database, so they both increment the "post count". So, if someone asks question #3,500,000, the next question or answer, whether it's related to #3,500,000 or not, will be #3,500,001. However, the question numbered #3,500,000 may only be the 800,000th question.
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ravenJun 27 '10 at 22:29

To add on to waiwai933's comment too. Jeff and Joel spent weeks talking about SO, before it went live. (According to Jeff it, was about 6-8 weeks before the site when live.) There was a considerable number of people following the podcast before the site launched. That helped out quite a bit.